Faithfulness and sensitivity for ancilla-assisted process tomography

Abstract: A system-ancilla bipartite state capable of containing the complete information of an unknown quantum channel acting on the system is called faithful. The equivalence between faithfulness of state and invertibility of the corresponding Jamiolkowski map proved by D'Ariano and Presti has been a useful characterization for ancilla-assisted process tomography albeit the proof was incomplete as they assumed trace nonincreasing quantum operations, not quantum channels. We complete the proof of the equivalence and introduce the generalization of faithfulness to various classes of quantum channels. We also explore a more general notion we call sensitivity, the property of quantum state being altered by any nontrivial action of quantum channel. We study their relationship by characterizing both properties for important classes of quantum channels such as unital channels, random unitary operations and unitary operations. Unexpected (non-)equivalence results among them shed light on the structure of quantum channels by showing that we need only two classes of quantum states for characterizing quantum states faithful or sensitive to various subclasses of quantum channels. For example, it reveals the relation between quantum process tomography and quantum correlation as it turns out that only bipartite states that has no local classical observable at all can be used to sense the effect of unital channels.